A victory scored for Mother Earth in the Battle of Burnaby Mountain in British Columbia

By Roger Annis, Dec 2, 2014

Proposed Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion

On November 28, Kinder Morgan company was obliged to pull its geo-technical drilling rigs off the mountain in Burnaby, British Columbia. This followed a court appearance the day before in which the company’s legal case to be conducting exploratory drilling in a municipal park for a future tar sands pipeline collapsed. Burnaby is a municipality in the Vancovuer region.

Not only was the company obliged to stop drilling, it also acceded to withdraw its successful application for a court injunction that saw a massive police encampment created to protect the company’s operations. Police arrested more than 100 land and climate defenders in the course of an aggressive protection of Kinder Morgan; charges against most of those people have been dropped because Kinder Morgan provided erroneous GPS data to the court in its original injunction application.

Kinder Morgan thought it could bulldoze public opinion and environmental defense action out of the way. But it lost, thanks to sustained, daily protest actions, civil disobedience and important shifts in public opinion taking place about globlal warming and the grim prospects for the health of Mother Earth. The result is a considerable political setback to the company’s plans to build its Trans Mountain tar sands pipeline expansion from Alberta to the Port of Vancouver.

But the company will be back. The lust for profits has no limit nor moral compass. And a battle continues against the $5.4 SLAPP suit that Kinder Morgan has deposed against several of the spokepeople and organizations leading the fight against Trasn Mountain.

On November 30, hundreds of people gathered on Burnaby Mountain to celebrate the victory. They pledged to continue the fight against the pipeline and against the growing numbers of climate-wrecking projects by the world’s corporate vandals. The celebration brought together land defenders, First Nations people, environmental activists of all ages and a small but growing number of trade union activists.

Here are three articles that tell the story of the Battle of Burnaby Mountain:

Roger Annis is a longtime socialist and trade union activist. He began his political activism with the Young Socialists of the day in Nova Scotia while at university. Since then, he has lived in most regions of Canada, including in Montreal where he became fluent in French. He is a retired aerospace worker living in Vancouver. Roger writes regularly on topics of social justice and peace.